8 ms·
Farewell, Periscope
- jlrubin 6y agoDang :( I always got excellent engagement on my periscope livestreams given my existing twitter audience, will have to look for an alternative that has as good integration
- paulgb 6y agoIt sounds like the existing (albeit semi-hidden) ability to stream live from Twitter is not going away, so if your audience is mostly on Twitter that might still be a good option for you.
- haunter 6y agoWill this be like Vine > Tiktok all over again?
- Snitch-Thursday 6y agoI used to follow Brian Goulet of fountain pen fame on Periscope. I think either he stopped streaming or I stopped watching when Twitter bought Periscope and stopped letting people easily record their streams by sending them to a recording service. Since then, I've not heard one mention of Periscope in my local circles, which is only anecdotes, but my point is that there is definitely room for a startup to redo the same app idea. For me, Byte replaced Vine since iirc some of the Vine founders were involved with Byte's startup. Byte <> ByteDance
- kangaroozach 6y agoWhich vine founders? Colin who sadly passed away?
- amanzi 6y agoMy kids still spend hours watching Vines on YouTube. Twitter really missed the boat on that one.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pkamb 6y agowhy not use the Periscope brand as their Stories feature? Instead they use something new called Fleets?
- hombre_fatal 6y agoIt’s a commodity feature that now even Youtube has so I don’t think there’s much to leverage a brand into. Kind of like how I’ve never seen someone call Periscope by name as people just say they’ll be streaming on Twitter. Similarly I doubt I’ll ever see someone use Fleet to refer to a Twitter Story.
- beamatronic 6y agoCouldn't they pick a better name? Fleet is some kind of enema.
- ballenf 6y agoIt's a fair point. The enema company was the 2nd-4th entry everywhere except google's search product and Twitter didn't make the first page (again, except on goog). The only time I've heard fleet used outside the enema context is when specifically talking about a group of vehicles. Fleet and fleeting don't really have much overlap in terms of definition. Presumably Twitter was going for the latter meaning, but went with the former.
- jodrellblank 6y ago> "We’ve brought most of the core capabilities of Periscope into Twitter. [...] We’ve learned so much, shared incredible experiences together" Another one for "Our incredible journey" https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
- acwan93 6y agoI'm so glad there's a site that's been keeping around the corporate-speak and well wishes for acquihires (no sarcasm intended). It's part amusing and interesting to see how founders or leaders of an org spin a acquisition or shut-down.
- gk1 6y agoUnlike the announcements in "Our incredible journey," this one seems fairly honest and to-the-point. Considering the years of effort that went into Periscope it's reasonable for them to reflect on that time in a positive way.
- romwell 6y ago>Considering the years of effort that went into Periscope it's reasonable for them to reflect on the work that their users have invested into that platform to make the founders rich only to be sold for profit in a positive way FTFY
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sacredcows 6y agoI’ve never used periscope but a few years ago I was at a comedy festival. There was this guy in the audience who was being obnoxious, and when Jeff Ross confronted him, the audience member said he was streaming the show on Periscope. He eventually got booed out of the hall.
- allenu 6y agoIt's interesting how quickly the social space changes. I remember when this first came out, and there was Meerkat as well, it felt like a lot of interesting innovations were possible when it came to social media. The space is starting to feel mature, and to me, a little stale. There isn't a sense of adventure and wonder now with social media.
- nautilus12 6y agoI think people are just waking up to the fact that they deep down prefer being social in person. If it weren't for COVID-19, probably would have started to accelerate.
- kreelman 6y agoIs it perhaps insensitive to say 'Down Periscope'.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- moonbug 6y agoWhat's Periscope?
- divbzero 6y agoTwitter’s standalone app for live video streaming.
- romwell 6y agoIt hasn't been Twitter's until Twitter bought it a few years back. It's yet another one of the acquire - erase stories deserving a spot on Our Incredible Journey blog. [1]https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
- ChuckMcM 6y agoThis, I suppose, is unexpected. It reflects a similar fate of a lot of technology plays that grew fast. I would like to reflect however on this comment in the article -- "The truth is that the Periscope app is in an unsustainable maintenance-mode state, and has been for a while. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen declining usage and know that the cost to support the app will only continue to go up over time." I understand how a startup madly codes and adapts to get to something that "sticks" with the user community. But where I get lost is how, in the process of acquisition and integration of a startup's technology into a company that is nominally not a startup, how is it that you go 5 years after acquisition and NOT retire the technical debt? How does a VP of Engineering oversee the integration of a startup into their domain and not spend the time it takes to reduce the operational costs of maintenance to as close to zero as possible? In today's world of BigCorp adding features by buying HotStartup, how can they not follow through an actually make that new tech a feature? If a feature is not getting anything new, it should take zero engineering resources. If the plaform's on which it runs change/update, there can be documentation on all of the platform features used, and how, a build system and a regression system, so that you take the code out of the box. Port it, test it, put it back in the box and go away again. Same thing with bugs or CVEs. When I was at Google it amazed me how many pieces of infrastructure were 'hot messes' in the sense that the people maintaining them didn't really know anything about how they worked, just how to run a test and revert if they broke. But there was no senior leadership pushing to understand the component interfaces and how the 'fleet' was at risk or interconnected. Just a bunch of fiefdoms. And inevitably people who kept things complicated so that they were "irreplaceable" for their own job security anxieties. If you are an engineer and you start moving up into senior leadership roles, understand that this is your job. Not to be be the whiz kid that just came up with a billion dollar idea, but to be the careful, thoughtful, strategist that makes sure the billion dollar idea doesn't eat all of its revenue in operational costs.
- zestyping 6y agoThe most plausible explanation, to me, is that operating the product was not considered the primary purpose of the acquisition.
- 6y ago
- niffydroid 6y agoShame I really liked this. I could watch stormy weather in the South of the USA, hurricanes rolling in. I even saw someone live streaming driving about in it. The best ever use I got from it was watching the attempted coup in Turkey. I was able to see a news station get overrun, I saw bullets fired from helicopters against protests. The worse one was an armoured personal carrier getting surrounded and then other soldiers fire into the open APC after the occupants opened up.
- m3kw9 6y agoMeerkat initially lost to them but has since pivoted to Houseparty
- lsllc 6y agoFor a moment, I was wondering if this was the amazing Periscope DOS debugger that had somehow lived on (it's not). Anyway, this is the best link I could find about it: https://books.google.com/books?id=-j4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA21&lpg=PA21&dq=periscope+debugger&source=bl&ots=xnket_qz2o&sig=ACfU3U2lvZ4YRVEefhC-lEgfZgAsvDAMlA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjAmv6EjdHtAhUHd98KHfHOD0MQ6AEwBnoECAcQAg#v=onepage&q=periscope%20debugger&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=-j4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA21&lpg=P...
- mikewarot 6y agoI was wondering how that amazing debugger that hooked to the NMI pin of a PC made its way into a Mobile App... different thing poaching the name.
- m3kw9 6y agoI’m surprised Twitter didn’t add stories into Periscope
- saurik 6y agoSo all periscopes that weren't shared with Twitter are just being deleted in three months?
- tpoacher 6y agoLet's hope that active periscopers will see this as an opportunity to explore other, better mediums, like e.g. peertube, rather than simply return to youtube. (I'm looking at you Scott Adams!)
- throwmeaway0909 6y agoI haven't seen anyone else mention this yet, so maybe I'm completely out to lunch, but it's possible that Periscope had similar issues that PornHub (et al) had to deal with recently but, due to all of the reasons they mentioned in the article, are choosing simply to shut down rather than invest in heavier moderation. If you look at the top streams worldwide on any slow news day, a moderate to high percentage will be OnlyFans models doing self promotion. Periscope bans nudity, so there is a non-zero human cost to moderate this. And with declining numbers in general, the amount of moderation needed goes up relative to the overall userbase. I'm also convinced that there is a Periscope "underground" where people anonymously share and promote truly illegal content via private streams (where the only "private" aspect is the URL). In the past, Periscope may have been able to turn a blind eye because it's not visible through the app, but with increased scrutiny on illegal content, the easiest and cheapest way to deal with it is to shutter the service.
- draw_down 6y agoCome on
- lazydon 6y agoMy main use of Periscope was to watch live football (not the American one) matches. Going to miss that! The part of the world where I live sports subscription fees are simply too high and controlled by duopoly of old school companies. On Periscope, it was great to have some good person point their phone camera to a large screen TV and watch the match together with many others on chat. Thanks Periscope for letting me enjoy live action of a few El Clásicos!
- pgt 6y agoIMO Periscope missed the boat purely because of lack of marketing. The only reason I know of its existence is because Scott Adams uses it daily (or used to) for his political commentary on Coffee with Scott Adams. Aella_Girl just discovered you could live stream on Twitter, and that feature is, as far as I know, backed by Periscope.
- rmason 6y agoI remember in 2015 when Meerkat launched. I liked it and everybody thought it would be the next big thing. People were starting to do very creative things with it. But Meerkat was not to be. You see Twitter had bought a competitor for $86 million that had yet to launch called Periscope. Meerkat spread quickly through the use of Twitter. But when Twitter launched Periscope (which I always thought was the inferior product) and cut off Meerkat's Twitter access in effect torpedoing it. Twitter bought a previous short video startup previously (can't remember the name) only to kill it too. I would have liked to see what Meerkat might have been.
- draw_down 6y ago... and then Periscope got buried by Instagram live and YouTube anyway. Hard to see a lesson besides “big guys win”
- hienyimba 6y agoTwitter seems to keep failing at these acquisitions. Hence we can give Zuck some credit for the continued success of Instagram, WhatsApp and Occulus. If Twitter has been successful with Vine and Periscope, they would have had successes as big as TikTok and Zoom. Ironically, there would be calls to break-up Twitter today.
- esc_colon_q 6y agoTwitter's CEO is basically an absentee leader, time-splitting with his other company which actually makes money and spending his free hours sucking up to rappers because he is desperate not to appear as an uncool white guy. Is it any shock that their strategy is garbage?
- bzb6 6y agoDamn right. I saw a picture of him recently and he looks like a bum. That’s what happens when they brainwash you into thinking you should be ashamed of what you are.
- tiimbz 6y agoWhat I really liked with Periscope was the map view, where you could see on a world map where a live stream was happening. It was a great way to find random interesting streams around the world. I didn’t see Twitter Live having that same feature. Is it hidden somewhere?
- kangaroozach 6y agoI always thought that Dick Costolo overpaid for Periscope when it was pre revenue as one of his last decisions before being (possibly) fired. It was wreckless and borderline shady. Mostly because they could have cloned it for much less and it didn’t get have any users or brand equity.
- jug 6y agoStrange how neither Periscope nor Vine, both getting pretty popular early on (lots of celebrities used Vine and Twitter were getting quite some traction) are now no more. Meanwhile Musicaly/TikTok did the basically same once more, and what do you know, there was a demand all along. Twitter could have been running "today's TikTok" and it's an incredible blunder. I'm not sure why Twitter abandoned Vine but I think it had to do with feed moderation, that they didn't have the resources and infrastructure in place to moderate illegal content. At least there were some noise over underage porn trying to dodge filters and banned keywords in media some time before they pulled the plug. If so, that reeks of misunderstanding the potential and not just throwing cash at the problem. They obviously have what's necessary in place over at Twitter.com and they aren't novices at this, so just... why. I remember seeing everyone from Game of Thrones cast members to comedians to just random people being enthusiastic over it. They were sitting on a gold mine and didn't even fight. Periscope was also cool in a different way. I could click on a map at some person in Scandinavia and see her live stream stuff as she was talking a walk on the snow clad streets.
- nefitty 6y agoWoah, that map feature sounds amazing! When I’m super bored and feeling curious about other places, I’ll pop on over to https://map.snapchat.com https://map.snapchat.com It doesn’t require an account, works on any browser (including mobile) and lets you see snaps from anywhere in the world. It didn’t fully scratch my itch like I think that periscope feature would have. I’m a little sad to have just learned about it today. Btw, my favorite places to check out on the snap map are rural arctic countries. It’s so cool to see people in their cozy houses sharing pictures of their local food. It also blows my mind that their lives are not much different than mine, except they have a foreboding icy world right outside their doors lol